You might be tempted to skip the warm up when you work out. After all, you only have so much time to train.
Warming up is a critical component of your fitness routine, skipping it could have unpleasant and even dangerous results—such as muscle strain, muscle injury and pain.
Oh and Fun Fact: A proper warm-up will actually IMPROVE your workout performance!
The Warm-up: Basics
A warm up is a short period at the beginning of your Training session. It is generally low intensity and prepares your body for the upcoming exertion.
The purpose of a traditional warm up is to slightly increase your heart rate. This raises your core body temperature and increases the blood flow to your muscles. Cold muscles and other connective tissues do not stretch very easily. A warm up session literally warms your muscles up, making them more supple and ready to work.
Without a warm up, you will be more susceptible to sprained muscles, cramps and injury. Ultimately, these effects could keep you from Training or Competing for an extended period of time as you recover, which is not conducive to the healthy lifestyle you desire.
It takes about three minutes for your body to realize that it needs to move more blood to your muscles, so the ideal warm up time is between five and ten minutes.
There is no set prescription for what your warm up should consist of. You can choose a set of regressed preparatory exercises (such as squats, lunges, toe touches, etc.,) or you can do a light intensity version of your upcoming workout (a brisk walk to prepare for a run, for example, or lifting light weights before increasing the load).
The Warm-Up: Advanced Strategy
Now with all that being said about a “basic” warm-up, let me share with you how I personally prepare myself, as well as every one of my personal training clients.
For long-term health and performance combined with your weight loss training efforts it’s important to understand that a proper warm-up is about more than just “warming up the body.” It’s a about preparing the body for an all-out training assault that’s going to boost your metabolism through the roof.
Therefore, we look at the warm-up as a Preparation Phase for the workout to come.
Through research and practical experience we’ve determined that best results are typically seen when an exercise prep routine incorporates 3 key components:
Tissue Quality
Corrective Exercise
Mobility & Activation
We will cover all 3 components individually in our Next training Blog
Stay Tuned!